Oh Pity the Living
by xxxPiratePrincessxxx
Summary: RebelLeader!Branson, AU Revolution. She's dead, she's lying dead and still warm and still beautiful in his arms, and there is war all around them.


She dies an ordinary death, the way many men have gone; on the wrong day, in the wrong place, at an hour unremarkable. Tom hasn't a sundial or the hand of a watch to remind him what instant she bled out of this world and leaked into the next.

If she feels pain she doesn't show it- only surprise. Even the faintest blush of fury, painting her cheeks; making her look fresh and rosy, as she's looked many times in his bed. "Sybil," he says, as the fight continues around him. China plates break. Chairs are thrown. "Sybil," he says again, and cradles her head in his palms like the Bibles he's never cherished. She stirs and trembles and opens her eyes.

"Oh, damn- _goddamn _this pain in my belly," she murmurs, and her glassy eyes roll back into the stars. She dies. Tom holds her beautiful mouth against his ear for breath that doesn't come. More bottles break. Thomas, suddenly at his elbow, reaches to tug at Tom's coat.

"Branson, we've got to- _Jesus_. Mary, mother of God." He makes the sign of the cross with pale fingers, even as the colour drains from his handsome face. "Branson- Tom- bring her, there's still time-"

"I'm afraid not," Tom says coolly, and stands. His hands go to his belt, and the brace of make-shift pistols tucked there. He raises them to the level of his heart and fires. Two aristocrats fall. "Get to the car, man," he adds, and Thomas for once rushes to obey. Tom stands, reaches up, slides out a decorative sword from above the mantel. A heavy-set man charges forward, Sybil's eyes glittering in his face, and without preamble Tom cuts him down, then the newspaper baron behind him; in a moment the floor is slick with blood. Men are thrown in front of him, and he obliges.

He cuts down every dandy outside and a ferocious woman, who reminds him of Captain O'Brien but ginger, pausing only to spare the maids. He makes it to the car in a shade of himself, crusted with red foam, speechless, wild-eyed, hauling her corpse on his shoulder. He snarls and snaps at the men who try to take her from him, clears the back seat of his car of ammunition with a sweep, and lays her out upon it. "Get up," he says again and again as they drive, then at the base all through the night, until Thomas is nearly ready to put him out of his misery.

On the hood of his car in the darkness Tom spills out every jar of enchanted Irish soil, every charm worn at his mother's waist, every lucky foot and cursed jade won at a funfair, takes the key to the fallen Abbey from General Carson's memorabilia. He finds Lady Cora (even as Captain O'Brien's superior she refuses to relinquish the title she turned traitor to) and cuts off a lock of her dark hair, as she, sobbing brokenly, presses a finger to her lips and lays it on her baby's cold mouth.  
He piles them up on her chest, above her heart. He prays in Irish and stumbling Welsh and the French she taught him.

At dawn he sleeps in the front seat, hands empty, eyes dark.

The change in Tom is not slow, or right; not a fade into gentleness, or dotage, or despair. He changes, sharp and sudden as a northern wind, and a hundred times as cold. He finds the Countess straight-backed in a mansion by the sea, and would've slit her throat if it weren't for the veil still shading her grieving eyes. He leaves her and finds the cottage where Mary hides, drags out the angel-faced eldest from her Turkish lover's bed, pushes her into General Carson's arms and lets her weep into the chest that had cradled her as a child. He finds Edith by the ocean from Mary's words (who is already painting her porcelain skin with rebel dye) and is thrown, staggering, into deep water, watching Napier's eyes harden as he holds the girl he once ignored for her sister. Private William drags him out and leaves him puking in the woods where they camp, where he sleeps that night, ignoring Nurse Anna's worried pleas.

They bury her on a stretch of land in the middle of nowhere, and for weeks Tom does not come out of the rebel's camp again at all, just locks the door and drinks through the day as he did when the hole was dug, and far into the night.

He becomes a radical at last; hollow-eyed and rotten; but with no better luck.

One night, deep in the drink, the servant-turned-rebel staff all a respectful distance from the reach of his arms and crumbling chauffer's uniform; she appears.

"Please go," he waves her away, the light and curse of his dreams. "Please go back to Heaven and bother the men there."

"She's not from Heaven, Tom," says a very familiar voice.

When Tom turns, Matthew is before him, good dependable Matthew; the boy who went off to war and found the enemy with his best friend's face, who was shot for disloyalty when he stopped the bullet meant for his sister-in-law's head. The man who all the rebels wept for when they recovered his body, stolen in a raid from the chambers of Lord Grantham himself. The man who gave Mary up for honour and duty.

The fool.

"Begone," Tom says, no longer drunk on memory. "You've a wife to haunt, remember." Matthew gives him a fond, if ghostly, smile.

"No, Tom. Just a bargain, for you. A particularly fine one." Sybil fades back into view, lovely and ripe as an apple, hair tossed by the breeze, her face split in a mischievous grin. The ache in the rotted core of him is too much to bear, so he looks away.

"Go to hell, Matthew."

"Thanks, Tom, but this particular space is reserved for you. You being a _friend_ and all." He's polite, respectable in an officer's coat dripping with his own blood, his hands still slender and human. Matthew stretches out his hand and the spectre of her takes form, clasps the offered palm. "You can join us, you know. The war's almost over. You finally brought down the aristocracy, with her death. I bet you didn't even know that was daddy-in-law you cut down when you took Downton."

"Why ?" he whispers. "I've got the servants to think of. What'll they do if I leave them?"

Matthew waves his hand, and a flood of images fills his mind. Second-in-Command Thomas crying, a feat seemingly impossible, back bowed under the soothing touch of Nurse Anna's hand. Edith and Napier hand-in-hand, standing right now at the gates of the rebel camp holding a white flag of peace. Carson holding Mary up to place a reconciling kiss on her sister's forehead. Cora in O'Brien's arms, face hidden under the Captain's drooping curls. The cooking staff clustered together, Mrs Patmore and Mrs Hughes and little Daisy with William's hands on her shoulders, eyes closed and swaying in a silent vigil. Bates and Alfred comforting Gwen, the first to turn traitor, guided by the grace of Sybil's boundless love.

"They'll live," Matthew says.

Tom takes his wife's hand.


End file.
